I’m Christopher Ross. I build, repair, and teach WordPress at the senior end of the market. The credentials behind that sentence: an Ma in Learning and Technology from Royal Roads University, 22 years of instructional design delivered inside corporate training rooms and government programs, and a Government of Canada CS-03 record that taught me what accessibility and security actually cost when somebody audits the build.
I’ve been building websites since 1996. WordPress since 2007. The math gets less interesting after a while; what matters is what those years bought. They bought the ability to walk into a fragile newsroom build, a stalled LMS migration, or an accessibility-bleeding government property and say what’s actually wrong before the meeting ends.
Who I work with
Three groups, and they break down cleanly.
How I work, and what it costs
Two line items, written into every proposal:
I never blend the two into one number. If a proposal looks like a single hourly rate, the buyer is paying senior-delivery prices for advisory time or advisory prices for delivery time. Both are wrong. Two rates, two columns, every time.
Speaking and the WordCamp circuit
I get invited to talk about this work. Recent talks include “Fifteen Years of WordCamp Talks: a WordPress Career arc” and a session on LMS architecture for educators making the leap from off-the-shelf course platforms to WordPress-native delivery. If you’re organizing a WordCamp, a higher-ed conference, or a corporate training event, the speaker page has my current topics and rates: /speaking/.
a recent engagement, lightly anonymized
a national training organization came in with an LMS that had been quietly degrading for three years. Course completion data was unreliable, the SCORM packages had stopped reporting cleanly to head-office reporting, and the in-house team had been told the fix was a six-figure replatform onto a proprietary system. We spent the first week not building anything. I read the database, traced the reporting pipeline, and found that two plugins were silently overwriting each other’s completion writes during the nightly cron window.
The fix was eight hours of senior delivery and a documented runbook so their internal team could spot the same failure pattern next time. The replatform conversation got cancelled. That’s the work I’d rather be doing than another rebuild.
What I publish, and why it’s free
I maintain a handful of free plugins on WordPress.org and a long-running blog of technical writeups. The plugins are free because the WordPress economy gave me a career; the writeups exist because I’ve spent 22 years explaining technical decisions to non-technical buyers and I’d rather do that in public than in a pitch deck. If a post answers your question, I’ve done my job. If it raises a sharper one, that’s what the discovery call is for.